Posts Tagged ‘Eliot’

As to the project of the century, the operation to outdo Normandy, as to the details concerning tincans and DaDa—you, cher publique, shall have to wait (with baited breath I’m sure) for another week, another post, as the spirit (or should I say author function?) compels me not (to reveal the goods).

He/She/IT DOES move me to write—just what–I’m not quite sure. As I said, the operation is stayin’ under wraps until all the allies are back in town and ready for ACTION, however, I would like to reveal something about this here (part of the) circus.

I could cut right to serving you what I got, if infact, I knew what I were serving. As it stands, friends, I’m not sure if I’m baking crème brule, coconut dream cake or spaghetti squash surprise.

As I’m not one to wax on and on about my own tawdry tales (because they ain’t anywhere NEAR tawdry), the all too easy blogging route, pour moi, would be to ramble onwards, upwards, outwards and… onwards about my inner musings, miffs and mysteries.

But like most Fosse musicals, I needs me some structure. Yea I said it: I need structure. I can’t sit still in class, I abhor wearing a bra and I’m prone to roll around on the floor before conforming to ANY form of inhibition, nevertheless, cookie cutters, decorative filing folders and other tools for organizational ba-liss are totally condoned, approved and encouraged. They make la vie une plus facil…or something there like.

Besides, I’m not talkin’ strict high school style 5-paragraph expository essay, I mean structure looses all efficacy if it’s just to homogenize, limit, and facilitate this beauracratic hoop-lala known as just about everything.

But let’s be real, everybody who’s got a blog, has got a gimmick. Now I’m no game-a-playin’ lady, but I wouldn’t mind saying SOMETHING that signifies (oh just maybe) SOMETHING….even if it is told by an idiot (me). Thus, we return, ironically, to structure…

…but not before taking a(nother) detour. Me thinks the title shall have to evolve: for while life IS a circus and I a mere aspiring trapeze artist, I can’t help but ABHOR that

A) I include my NAME in the title (uggg how eGOcentric) and

B) I make waaaay too many post-structurialist puns and academic (dis)allusions to NOT have them be, somehow, a part of the title. I mean I SHUN academia and all its lauded tenets of knowledge, truth, “unpacking”, insert random esoteric BULL. BUT I can’t, sadly, deny it’s come to sculpt me in less than subtle (but hopefully not too obvious) ways. We are, I suppose, both what we eat and what we rebel against.

I also think the uncharacteristic, excessive amount of deconstructionist allusions etc. (even if only apparent to me) results from my feeling incredibly awkward about blogging and blabbering on and on about yours truly. Ewww. Perhaps all the referencing that movement which celebrates and overtly basks in over-referencing makes me feel slightly better about all this shenaniganism as it’s the best a self-depreciating, playful sprite can do to atone for/acknowledge the fact that this is, well, ridiculous.

So regarding STRUCTURE–in the simplest of terms—here’s the deal. In addition to existential musings, the daily round UP on TinCANdada, this here epicenter of linguistic loveliness shall also contain a weekly chronicle of my current etude.

What’s with the etude you say? No it’s not an apple-era word for some kind of virtual, electronic attitude. It’s an exercise, challenge of sorts, in which I strive to make people feel uncomfortable, make myself feel uncomfortable and dare to do what only those with an exurbanite amount of derring-do…dare do.

Much like my mini-crusades and weekly-etudes back in the *abyss, I shall continue to smile at strangers, leave packages and poems for persons of interest, perform interpretive dances whilst waiting in line at Whole Foods…

Beyond stretching myself, these sojourns shall surely provide ample and varied reactions of horrification and bemusement from my fellow human beings who shall act as witness, and sometimes subject, to my antics. If nothing else, this blog shall be a means of keeping me honest, good and accountable: makin’ sure I’m spreading the awkward love that binds us all.

For life’s a grail quest and whether self-given, universally bestowed or somehow inherited, etudes, obstacles, paying-the-freakin’-bills: these are the grail challenges of the ipad, I think I’m so rad, age. Smiling at stranger’s subs in for jousting; wooing fetching baristas with sonnets equals the new javelin.

For like most children of a certain age, I’m just an artist still settling on an art (I HAVE ruled out fire breathing and mosaics). I’m in dialogue with voices from the past trying to say something OLD in NEW words—the same game that Emerson, Eliot, Calvino et. ALL have long played, long aced and long inspired.

Perhaps the name of this game, more than awkward etudes, shall be finishing, or rather STARTING my education, by openly, publicly engaging with all the figures, movements and ideas that academia DIDN’T get a chance to ruin for me. I mean, everybody knows a liberal arts education teaches you NOTHING of practical value—which, frankly, I’m pretty OK with (most days), as I’m not so into the practical.

I am into being a human–into feeling and loving, into knowing not why but saying Yes, that’s ok, YES please anyway.

So raise a glass to sending me off to get myself some culture, some class, some CLUE of what it is to be alive in an age of perpetual “unmounring” (here here for undergrads who conquered Adorno!). But considering I couldn’t even sit through Katrin Pahl’s deconstructionist manifestos, no thank you to any further seminar tables (even if you get to bang on them at the end) and surveys of this unimportant thing and that obsolete idea.

So I beg, you few (if any!) readers, where, with whom or what to commence?

* Abyss = college = my college experience at The Johns Hopkins University. It can also be used in general terms to refer to the collective, universal wasteland that is the practice of the humanities and most other non-scientific disciplines in modern academia.

As a child I had my soapbox; as a teen my vehement–and some might argue inappropriate–letters to teachers and all figures of authority, as a post 20 non-adult, I have my rambling, partially-poetic, partially pathetic musings of life, liberty the pursuit of happiness but more importantly art and the really big one amour. It’s universal, it’s infinite, it’s bigger than me and you and to that I say yes.

This blog, these ruminations gone wild (and public!) is a testament to my saying YES to life; the innate sorrow/joy that is this world, that is this temporal abyss of continual loss; this crazy/beautiful circus that envelops, cradles and maddens every being that dares to BE.

Contrary to how it might seem, like a certain pipe, ce n’est pas une post–tis a mere preface to a post. Ze overture to a grand gesamtkunstwerk; the still moment before the conductor gives the downbeat; that moment in between falling forward and falling apart, the moment we uproot from the beginning to, again, start down the cyclical route which shall bring us home to know the place for the first time.